Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Jack by Marilynn Robinson

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN 9780374279301

Hardcover, $27, 320 pages

One of the few reasons I don't mind the end of summer and the move into fall is that publishers tend to release so many great books in the fall season. This year, many book publication dates were moved from the spring and summer to the fall due to COVID-19, so there seem to be an abundance of great books. In the upcoming posts, I'll cover a few of the great ones I read.

Years ago, I fell in love with Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Told in the voice of an older minister in 1950's Iowa, John Ames writes to his very young son, telling him his life story and sharing his beliefs. Her second novel set in the small town, Home, is a retelling of the prodigal son parable with John Ames' godson, Jack Boughton, (son of Ames' best friend, Reverend Robert Boughton) having returned home after twenty years, now an alcoholic petty thief who spent time in prison.

Robinson returns to this story in Jack, where we go back to the time that Jack spent away from his family. After being released from prison, Jack ends up in St. Louis, where he meets a young Black schoolteacher, Miss Della Miles. He helps Della pick up papers she dropped in the rain, and walks her home. She  mistakes him for a reverend by his dress and manner and invites him into her home for tea. 

Jack is entranced by Della, but knows that nothing can come of this, he is not worthy of this fine woman, not to mention that the differences in their races makes a further relationship possible. After he finds her accidentally locked in a cemetery (where he has been sleeping as he is homeless and jobless), they spend the evening together talking and opening up to each other. 

Much of the novel is taken up with this evening. They share a love of poetry, both have fathers who are ministers, and both are outsiders in society. Jack fights this feeling of falling in love, but Della finds herself more willing to give in to her growing feelings for this complicated, flawed man no matter the cost to her.

After parting in the morning, Jack decides that he will try to become worthy of the man that Della believes him to be. He gets a job in a shoe store, then as a dance instructor, but the hardest obstacle for him to overcome is his alcoholism.  

Robinson writes the interior life of characters so insightfully. We thoroughly see Jack, even when he can't see himself clearly. Every time the lure of alchohol calls to him, we want to reach through the page and beg him not to drink. We want him to be the better man that Della believes him to be. Jack explains himself in this passage:

"I have not actually chosen this life. The path of least resistance is not a choice, in the usual sense of the word. I know it appears to be one. But when the resistance you encounter on every other path seems, you know, indomitable, then there you are. I'm sure I have been too easily discouraged."

In 1950s St. Louis, a interracial relationships are forbidden. Della's roommate reminds her of everything she could lose- her job as a teacher, the respect and love of her family in Memphis, even her freedom- if she persues a relationship with this man. Although set seventy years ago, the race issue is relevant today.

Jack is a quiet book, like all of Robinson's books. We spend most of the book inside the head of Jack, a complicated character who may remind us of someone in our own lives. The writing, as always from Robinson, is exquisite. Reading Jack will make you more compassionate towards others, a good thing in this increasingly contentious age of only engaging on divisive social media. I will be rereading Home now with a fresh eye to what happened to Jack while he was gone.  I know I will never forget him or Della. I give Jack my highest possible recommendation.

Two Spring Reads

Reprinted from auburnpub.com:

(This was published before spring break was extended and baseball cancelled due to COVID-19)

Spring begins this week and that brings to mind certain things- spring training for major league baseball, and spring break for teachers and students. Two wonderful debut novels feature many characters sharing their stories in those settings in this month’s Book Report.

Baseball fans are settling in for the start of a new season, and Emily Nemens’ debut novel, The Cactus League is set during spring training for the fictional major league Los Angeles Lions. Nemens tells her story through the lives of several characters, all of whom have an interesting take on their spring in Arizona.

Jason Goodyear is a former league MVP, one of the best ballplayers in the league, with a reputation as an all-round good guy. He’s handsome, kind to his fellow players as well as fans, with a Derek Jeter-like reputation. 

But something is off with Goodyear this season. His two-year marriage to his schoolteacher wife is over, he is withdrawn, and his personal and professional life seem to be spiraling downward. He is hiding something big from everyone, something shocking.

Other people get to tell their own stories- the pitcher recovering from Tommy John surgery trying to hide that it did not work, the batting coach not yet ready to retire, the team owner with a secret, the woman who has a relationship with a different ballplayer every season (think Annie Savoy from the movie Bull Durham), the players’ agent, the agent’s young assistant, and the overhyped rookie who has discovered that he is not as good as he was in high school.

Nemens weaves their stories together to place the reader smack in the middle of a fascinating spring, and each character is so well-drawn, a remarkable feat as there are so many characters. I was completely captivated by this book, and it is a must-read for baseball fans.  Nemens is clearly a lifelong baseball fan and it shows. It would make a terrific limited television series. 

Other good novels with a baseball theme include Stephanie Evanovich’s The Sweet Spot, Linda Holmes’ Evvie Drake Starts Over and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.

If you’re a teacher going on spring break who will miss your colleagues, Roxanna Elden’s debut novel Adequate Yearly Progress will fill that void. Billed as The Office but set in an urban high school”, we are introduced to the teachers from Brae Hill Valley in a large Texas city. 

We meet Lena, a young spoken-word poet who moved from Philadelphia and is struggling to get her students engaged in English class. Mrs. Reynolds-Washington and Mrs. Friedman-Katz “two middle-aged women shared a love of tremendous jewelry, brightly colored pantsuits, and other people’s business” love to gossip and judge others. 

KayTee is an idealistic second-year teacher from TeachCorps who writes an anonymous blog about her experiences that goes viral. Dedicated biology teacher Hernan is Lena’s best friend looking for more than friendship. Maybelline is an uber-organized math teacher raising her young daughter on her own. Football coach Ray just wants to be left alone to win football games.

A new superintendent is hired for the city, a media superstar who has written a best-selling book and loves the spotlight. He announces a new program- Believers Make Achievers Zone, a group of schools with “poor students and poor test scores who will be receiving special attention” from him.

That special attention comes in the form of a consultant from TransformationalChangeAdvocacyConsultingPartners, whose main objective seems to be getting teachers to write a different Curriculum Standard of the Day in large letters on the white board each day (such as ALL STUDENTS ON TASK, ALL THE TIME). 

Teachers are now required to keep extensive binders filled with abundant data about the students that will be used to “innovate and catalyze disruptive change”. There is now an Office for Oversight of Binders and Evidence of Implementation, which makes math teacher Maybelline very happy as she is a big fan of organized data in binders.

Adequate Yearly Progress is laugh-out funny in parts (the comments on KayTee’s blog are especially hilarious), somber in other parts, and you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy this clever workplace book (but if you are, you will enjoy it on another level). Like The Cactus League, Eldens manages to make each interesting character’s story stand out as they intersect.  Fans of Laurie Gelman’s Class Mom will enjoy it.

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens- A+

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Hardcover, $27, 272 pages

Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanne Elden- A

Published by Atria

Trade paperback, $16.99, 378 pages

Someone by Alice McDermott

Someoneby Alice McDermott
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 978-0-374-28109-0
Hardcover, $25, 240 pages

No one writes about the Irish American experience better than Alice McDermott. Her National Book Award winning novel, Charming Billy, is the perfect example of that.

Her latest novel, Someone, tells the story of Marie, an ordinary Irish American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marie waits on her stoop everyday for her beloved father to come home from work, watching the activity on the block- the boys playing stickball, Billy Corrigan, blinded from the war, umpiring the game, and the men and women walking home from the subway.

Someone is all about an ordinary life- Marie's life. She goes to Catholic school, has a good friend Gertie, and a brother Gabe who is studying for the priesthood. The book goes back and forth in time, so we see the entirety of Marie's life- childhood, young adulthood, marriage, motherhood, sickness, health, births, deaths, growing old.

One thing that makes Marie stand out is that she has a problem with her eye. It affects not only her vision, but her outward appearance as well. When she finally gets a boyfriend, she feels elated. That balloon is burst when he dumps her for a woman who is prettier and comes from a wealthier family.

The title of the book comes from an exchange she has with her brother over this heartbreak. He tells her that the world is filled with cruelty and when she asks Gabe "Who will love me?", and he says "Someone-someone will."

And someone does. She meets Tom, who was abandoned by his vaudeville parents and nearly became an orphan train boy until a nun sent him to live with her widowed sister who just lost her son in a drowning. They build a life and a family together.

McDermott fills her beautiful novel with quiet moments of life- a mother brushing lint off the jacket of her son in his coffin, waiting to be picked up by family members at the airport, a baby sleeping warmly on his mother's shoulder.

Her language is gorgeous too. She speaks of aging as "a precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no." Of her husband, Marie said "he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child's."

After reading Someone, it would hard to pass by a person on the street and not wonder what his life story is. Everyone has a story and Marie was lucky enough to have Alice McDermott conjure up hers. And I was lucky enough to read it. I put Someone on my list of Most Compelling Reads of 2013.

I had the honor of meeting McDermott at the Book Expo of America last year and we chatted about attending SUNY-Oswego, and the snowy, cold weather neither of us misses. In addition to the book, we also received a CD filled with music that corresponds to the book. It is the perfect accompaniment to read with the book.

Alice McDermott signing books at BEA 2013

rating 5 of 5